FLASHBACK: Apple Store tests Idiot Bar as complement to Genius Bar

Scoopertino is closed for the holidays. In the meantime, we’ll recycle a couple of stories from our dusty archives. Like this one…

Cupertino, CA — Tired of waiting hours or days to get an appointment at the Genius Bar? Help is on its way.

Citing research that proves over 60% of the Genius Bar customers are clogging up the works with dumb questions, Apple is testing a new concept called the Idiot Bar.

By siphoning off customer problems ranging from the laughable to the pathetic, the Idiot Bar will free up the Geniuses to take care of more serious problems, more quickly.

“We like to think of the Idiot Bar staff as a lower grade of Genius,” said Ron Johnson, Apple’s VP of Retail. “These people are trained to speak your language.”

Customers recognizing their own intellectual handicap may make Idiot Bar appointments online. A greeter at the Genius Bar will also re-route worthy customers to the Idiot Bar after asking some basic questions.

The Idiot Bar will not only speed up the tech support function of the Apple Store, it is expected to open up a new revenue stream.

Surveys show that 84% of those qualified to visit the Idiot Bar tend to do exactly as they’re told — and no doubt they will frequently be told it’s time to upgrade.

After first proving the concept in backwoods markets, Apple plans to roll out the Idiot Bar in more sophisticated metropolitan stores as well.

“Trust me, I’ve seen the service records,” said Johnson, “the Idiot Bar could well become our most popular attraction.”

Though Apple bills the Idiot Bar as “tech support for the rest of us,” it may really be “for the most of us.”

This isn’t comedy, it’s sheer reportage. Anyone who has ever done any help desk/IT support at any level knows this well. That’s why when you call AppleCare, or whoever, you have to answer the same series of impossibly obvious questions, each time. “Is your computer plugged in?” Amazing, but a large number of “issues” are solved outright at this stage. And it’s only getting worse. Nobody knows anything anymore; we’ve all outsourced our memory and skill-sets to Wikipedia and Google. No one trusts common sense or life experience anymore; why bother, there’s eHow.com! Kids can’t do arithmetic without a pocket calculator, and type well but can’t write legibly in longhand above 10 WPM.

Solution: e-breathing. Yes, soon when Google offers to breathe for you for free, natural selection will take about 6 months to kill off these tens of millions of volunteer know-nothings (‘idiots’). They’ll hit a patch without 4G service, or the switching-box connecting to their cable modems will get hit by a truck, and its 4 minutes to e-Nirvana!